21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

2. All is One

‘Before the world was

And the sky was filled with stars… There was a strange unfathomable Body. This being, this Body is silent

And beyond substance and sensing. It stretches beyond everything spanning the empyrean.

It has always been here and it always will be. Everything comes from it, and then it is the Mother of Everything.

I do not know its name. So I call it TAO.’

In the classic Seventies book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig said that a lot can be learnt from where people choose to make the first ‘split’ in the world. Religion for instance might take the split to be between light and darkness, or perhaps Heaven and Earth. In philosophy and in science the most obvious split is between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’.

Our increasingly science-based, technology-driven, industrialised culture recognises only objects in its world view and discounts the reality of subjective experience. Hence, morals and aesthetics, both considered subjective, are given less and less prominence. There is no

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